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The conversation in the checkout line at Trustworthy Hardware and Fishing in Soldotna on Wednesday morning was whether or not to fish bait or artificials starting today.

Upstairs in the business office, company owner Paul Miller said his preferred silver fishing is done by trailing an egg rig off the back of a boat set on anchor. That’s it. Nothing more fancy or fishy than that.

Next month the Kenai Peninsula Borough will officially petition the state for a selection of state lands under a land-grant program that seeks to transfer an allotment of 27,000 acres into borough ownership.

The transfer, if approved, would bring the borough up to its legally appropriated amount of 155,780 acres.

Borough lands manager Marcus Mueller said the Aug. 14 presentation to the Alaska Department of Natural Resources is the beginning of the next phase in a decades-long process, which started in the late 1960s.

For as long as anyone can remember the fire defenses at Kenai’s historic Russian Orthodox church — filled with art and historical artifacts — have been three small fire extinguishers.

The next phase of a restoration and protection project set to begin next month will eventually reduce the threat of fire to the wooden church, which has for 118 years been the center of Kenai’s Russian Orthodox community, by installing a special fire suppression system, among other improvements.

A few years ago, during a 25-foot tide, a dipnet fisherman was found passed out, wet and hypothermic in his waterlogged tent on the beach near the mouth of the Kenai River.

With big tides again on the way and sure to push high up on the beach, the city of Kenai decided to close the north and south beaches to camping and parking. Both beaches are expected to be completely under water for some portion of the tide cycle.

“We’ve had these issues before, but have not been as proactive,” Kenai City Manager Rick Koch said.

One way to quantify the hoards of dipnetters working the beach is the number of hotdogs given out by a group of volunteers working the local salmon mission.

“We’re way over this year,” said Brenda Crim, creator and organizer of Salmon Frenzy, a dipnett beach mission run through Alaska Missions and Retreats.

Saturday, Crim, of Anchorage, said her group is on track to hand out 22,000 hotdogs by the close of this week when the last group of mission volunteers cycles through and the numbers of returning reds dwindle.

Nikiski firefighters and community members gathered Tuesday night to push a new Ladder Truck 1 into its home stall at Station 2.

The 40-ton fire truck arrived from its Wisconsin manufacturer earlier in the day as an upgrade replacement for the department’s previous Ladder 1, a 30-year-old rig. The pushing part is a long tradition stemming from the days of firefighting rigs built on carriages and carts.

Before the trucks traded positions, 100 gallons of water were ceremoniously pumped from the retiring rig into the storage tank of the new truck.

With its opening, life for Kenai Peninsula residents living with cancer has changed for the better.

The Peninsula Radiation Oncology Center officially opened its doors Wednesday afternoon to the patients it will serve and the community as a whole. Inside, they found one of the most advanced radiation centers in the state.

More than a year after the initial submission of an application to bury oil drilling waste near Nikiski the state has forwarded the permit to the its legal department for a final review.

The permit was sent to the State of Alaska Department of Law last week as required before the state will issue the go ahead to AIMM Technologies, which hopes to build and operate a monofill storage site for drilling waste produced by the nearby oil industry.